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Chapter Three
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2026-03-18 21:54:03Mona's POV
I woke in chains. Not ordinary chains - these burned against my skin, etched with runes that pulsed with sickly green light. The collar around my neck was worse, a constant weight that made breathing feel like drowning. "Ah, sleeping beauty awakens." Selena's voice drifted from the shadows of what I recognized as the pack's underground prison. "Three days you've been out. Almost missed your own birthday." Three days. My eighteenth birthday was tomorrow. "Where's Grandmother?" My voice came out raw. "Dead." Selena examined her nails. "Father had to make an example. Harboring a Phoenix Wolf, teaching it to use its powers - treasonous acts against the pack." Rage and grief warred in my chest, but when I tried to summon my fire, nothing came. The collar hummed, absorbing every spark of power. "Ingenious, isn't it?" She tapped the collar. "Made specifically to contain Phoenix Wolves. Father bought it years ago from a witch, just in case you ever... manifested. Cost him half the pack's treasury, but worth every penny." "Why?" I pulled against the chains. "Why not just kill me?" "Because you're still useful." Father entered, flanked by guards. "The Nightshade Pack is demanding answers about the attack. Three of their wolves died in that fire of yours. Derek Cross is particularly... insistent about seeing you." My heart jumped at Derek's name, but I kept my face neutral. "He claims you're his mate," Father continued, watching me closely. "Ridiculous, of course. You're nothing. But his delusion might be useful." "How?" "Simple. You'll reject him publicly at tomorrow's ceremony. Break the bond before it fully forms. Then Selena will accept him as her chosen mate instead." "He'll never agree to that!" "He will when he sees what you really are." Father pulled out a vial of dark liquid. "One drop of this in your system tomorrow, and your Phoenix nature will manifest just enough to terrify everyone. They'll see you as the monster you are. Derek will reject you himself." "You can't force a mate bond—" His backhand sent me sprawling, the chains cutting into my wrists. "I can do whatever I want. You're mine to control, always have been." He turned to leave, then paused. "Oh, and that little friend of yours? Sophie? She's been asking about you. Perhaps she needs to learn what happens to those who help monsters." "Don't touch her!" But he was already gone, leaving me with Selena's cruel laughter. Hours passed in darkness. The collar drained me, made thinking difficult. But then I heard it - a soft scraping sound. "Mona?" Sophie's whisper came through a crack in the wall. "Can you hear me?" "Sophie! You need to leave. It's dangerous—" "Shut up and listen. My grandmother survived. Barely, but she's alive. She gave me something for you." A small vial rolled through the crack. "Phoenix tears. Your mother's. Grandmother saved them for eighteen years." I grabbed the vial with shaking hands. It glowed softly, warm against my palm. "Three drops at midnight," Sophie instructed. "When your birthday truly begins. It won't break the collar, but it'll give you enough power to—" Footsteps echoed down the corridor. Sophie's presence vanished just as Leon appeared. I hid the vial in my palm as my brother studied me through the bars. He looked tired, conflicted. "Is it true?" he asked quietly. "Are you really a Phoenix Wolf?" "Would it matter if I was?" He was quiet for a long moment. "Mother cried for three days after Father told her the plan. She doesn't want this, but she's too afraid to oppose him." "She's not my mother, apparently." "She raised you. That counts for something." Leon pulled out a key. "I can't free you. But I can give you this." He unlocked the cell door and handed me a piece of bread and water. Hidden underneath was a small knife. "Leon—" "Father's wrong about many things," he said simply. "But I can't openly defy him. This is all I can do." He left before I could respond. As midnight approached, I felt it - a shift in the air, a tingling in my bones. My birthday. My awakening. With trembling fingers, I uncorked the vial of phoenix tears. Three drops on my tongue, Sophie had said. The effect was immediate. Fire erupted through my veins, but not the burning kind. This was pure power, ancient and vast. The collar sparked and sputtered, trying to contain it, but the tears were stronger. Then I heard him. *Mona.* Derek's voice in my mind, clearer than ever. *Derek? How—* *The mate bond. It's getting stronger. Where are you?* *Pack prison. Underground. They're going to make me reject you tomorrow.* *Like hell they are.* I felt his rage through the bond, hot and protective. *Don't come alone. Father has guards—* *I'm not alone. The Academy sent reinforcements. And Mona... your grandmother. The old woman. She's alive. Sophie's grandmother got her to healers in time.* Relief flooded through me. Grandmother was alive. *We're coming tonight,* Derek continued. *But you need to be ready. Can you fight?* I looked at Leon's knife, felt the phoenix tears still burning in my blood. *I can try.* *There's something else.* His mental voice grew serious. *The rogues who attacked three nights ago? They weren't random. Someone sent them. Someone who knew exactly what you were and wanted to force your power to manifest.* *Who?* *We're not sure yet. But Mona, this is bigger than just your pack. There are others looking for Phoenix Wolves. Others who—* His voice cut off abruptly. The collar had adjusted, blocking our connection. But I'd heard enough. Footsteps approached again. Multiple sets this time. "Get her ready," Father's voice commanded. "The ceremony's been moved up. We do this now, while it's still dark." Guards flooded into my cell. They unlocked my chains but kept the collar on, dragging me toward the stairs. "Father, please—" "Silence. You speak only when told." They hauled me to the pack circle, where hundreds of wolves had gathered despite the late hour. Selena stood at the center in a white dress, looking radiant. Derek was there too, held between two massive guards, his jaw clenched with fury. "We gather tonight," Father announced, "to witness a rejection and a new beginning." The crowd murmured, confused by the sudden ceremony. "Mona Blackstone has been found to possess dangerous, unstable powers," Father continued. "For the safety of our pack, she will reject her mate bond with Derek Cross." "That's not how mate bonds work!" someone shouted from the crowd. Father ignored them. "Speak the words, Mona." I looked at Derek. His storm-gray eyes met mine, and I saw a message there: *Not yet. Wait.* "I said speak!" Father grabbed my arm, nails digging in. "I..." My voice shook. The phoenix tears were wearing off, the collar's suppression growing stronger. "I..." A howl split the night. Then another. And another. But these weren't rogues. Academy wolves poured into the circle, dozens of them, their eyes glowing with purpose. At their head ran a massive silver wolf with ancient markings. The Headmaster himself had come. "Nobody move," Father snarled, pulling me against him, Leon's knife pressed to my throat. When had he found it? "One step closer and she dies." But I felt it then - midnight. My true birthday. And the phoenix tears weren't done with me yet. My skin began to glow.
최신 챕터
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Twenty
Mona's POVVesna's rider stood in my kitchen at midnight, and the letter he carried was written on the back of a child's drawing.That was the first thing I noticed when he pulled it from his coat. A crayon picture of a house with a red roof, and underneath the roof, on the reverse of the paper, Vesna's careful handwriting. She had used what she had. The rider was young — not one of her old fighters, one of the Bloodrose settlement's new generation — and he was so exhausted from the ride that I had Kael sit him down with a bowl of soup before I even opened the paper. The kitchen was quiet. The night cook had put another log on the fire out of respect for the strange hour. I read Vesna's letter twice. It was short. Mona. A man came to my door yesterday. He knew my mother's real name and three sentences she used to say to me at bedtime. Only my mother knew those. He offered me back what he called my birthright. He said your family had stolen it. He said he would come back in one month f
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Nineteen
Mona's POVI had not slept in three nights when the boy arrived at my gate, and if he had come a day later I might have missed him entirely.The last line on the back of my mother's letter had eaten me alive. Ask him what he did to my sister Amaya's daughter. Amaya's daughter — Vesna — the woman we had spent a decade fitting into a small house in Bloodrose. My mother had known Amaya had a daughter. My mother had known before Amaya had died, before Vesna was even five years old, and my mother had suspected the Shadow King of doing something to that child. That single sentence rearranged everything. It meant Vesna's mother might not have raised her the way we had all assumed. It meant the story we had been given — the one Amaya had told Vesna, the one Vesna had told Nova — had a shape underneath it none of us had touched yet. I sat with Nova and Selena in the herb garden for two nights running, the pages spread on a bench between us, and none of us could sleep. On the third night we agr
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Eighteen
Mona's POVI did not get the morning I was waiting for.Leon slipped in his sleep sometime near the false dawn — that grey hour when the birds have not yet decided whether to sing. Sophie found him first. She came to the porch where I had fallen asleep against his chair, and she touched my shoulder very gently, and when I opened my eyes she said only, "He's gone, Mona." I did not scream. I did not shatter. I stood up on legs that did not feel like mine and I went into the small room where he lay, and he looked the way he had looked at fourteen when I would wake him for a hunt — mouth slightly open, one hand loose on the blanket, as if in a moment he would groan and turn over. But the moment did not come. And the thing he had been going to tell me about our mother's death, the sentence he had promised for morning, was gone with him. I sat on the edge of his bed and I held his cool hand and I said, out loud, into the quiet room, "You cheated, brother." And I did not know if I meant it a
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Seventeen
Mona's POVSophie's letter came in the middle of a small ordinary breakfast, and I dropped my spoon into my porridge without noticing.The paper was thin. Her handwriting had gone slightly shaky in the past year, and I had been pretending not to see it. *Mona. Come when you can. He is not dying today, so don't ride like it. But he is not getting back up from this one. He asked me to tell you before anyone else.* I read it twice. My spoon was leaving a dark ring around itself in the bowl. Derek looked up from his own plate, saw my face, and set his cup down without a sound. "Leon?" he asked. I nodded. I could not speak yet. I folded the letter along its old creases. I thought of my brother the last time I had seen him — six months ago, at his own front door, waving me off with the arm that still worked properly, the other one already tucked into the sling he never quite admitted he needed. He had shouted after me, *Tell Cassian to write more, the boy has forgotten his uncle.* And I had
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Sixteen
Mona's POVDerek told me he was stepping down in a chicken coop, and I laughed so hard I sat down on an overturned bucket.He had gone to fetch eggs for the kitchen — a thing he had started doing on ordinary mornings after we came home from our long trip, because he said the small chores were the ones that kept a man human. I had followed him because I liked watching him do small things. He set his basket down. He looked at the fussing hens. He said, without turning around, "I want Cassian to have the pack, Mona. Before the year is out." Just like that. In a chicken coop. With straw stuck to his boot. I opened my mouth to say something serious and instead I laughed, because it was so like him — the biggest decisions of his life delivered in the smallest possible rooms. He turned around with an egg in each hand and a look on his face that was half offended and half relieved. "You're laughing at me." "I'm laughing at the coop, Derek." I stood up. I crossed the straw to him. I took the e
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One Hundred and Fifteen
Mona's POVThe note that said He knows Cassian went burned in my sleeve for three days before I made the choice that saved my life.I did not chase the traitor. I did not tear the Council apart. I did not put my son in a locked room with guards at the door. I sat with Derek in our chamber on the third night, and I laid the paper flat on the table between us, and I said the hardest sentence I had spoken in years. "If I keep hunting this shadow, I will lose the people I still have." Derek did not answer for a long time. He looked at the note. He looked at his hands. Then he reached across and folded the paper closed. "Then we set a trap he cannot see, and we live our lives on top of it," he said. That was the plan we made. Selena would keep watching the Council from inside. Nova would keep her mountain routes to Vesna and her ear on the wind. A hand-picked pair of Derek's oldest riders would shadow Cassian without Cassian knowing. And we — Derek and I — would do the one thing the traito
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter six
The fire took everything.My name. My body. My memories. All dissolved into white-hot nothing that burned beyond pain, beyond thought, beyond existence itself. I was a scream without a throat, terror without a mind, agony without flesh.Then Derek's voice, not heard but felt: *I'm here.*His presenc
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter Five
Mona's POVThe Shadow Walker moved faster than thought. One moment it stood at the edge of the circle, the next its claws were inches from my throat.Derek's wolf form slammed into it mid-leap, but passed right through as if the creature was made of smoke. The Shadow Walker solidified just in time
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter Four
Mona's POV The glow spread from my core outward, turning my skin translucent like living flame. Father jerked back, but kept the knife at my throat."Impossible," he snarled. "The collar—""Can't stop what's already inside her," a woman's voice rang out. A figure in Academy robes stepped forward,
The Phoenix Wolf's Awakening Chapter One
Mona's POVThe copper taste of blood filled my mouth as Father's fist connected with my jaw. Again."Worthless," he spat, towering over me as I crumpled against the kitchen wall. "Can't even set the table properly for your sister's engagement celebration."I wiped the blood from my split lip, keepi
